of hatred when I would not stop crying, some meanness born from jealousy. Some little act or omission, a brief ordinary failure of love that would not, in the end, explain anything.
We stood for a while in silence, which was rare for us. Ordinarily, my father and I avoided silence. We were both good talkers, and we knew how to keep the air around us thoroughly occupied with talk or games or snatches of song. The sickle shape of a hawk skated over the stars. An empty 7-Up can gleamed in the moonlight like something precious.
“Dad, listen,” I said.
He did not reply. It was only then that I realized how he was straining for breath.
“Dad?” I said. “Are you okay?”
His face was dim, his eyes unnaturally large as he concentrated on pulling in air. He had the shocked look of a fish pulled out of the water into a world of piercing, unbreathable light.
“Dad? Can you talk?”
He shook his head. My first thought was of flight. I could still get away; I could deny everything. No one need ever suspect me.
“Dad,” I said helplessly. “Oh, Dad, what should I do?”
He gestured me closer. I took hold of his shoulders, inhaling his whiskery, cologned smell, which had not changed since I was a baby. His lungs squeaked like a balloon being vigorously rubbed.
Carefully, as if he were made of porcelain, I helped lower him to a sitting position. I sat beside him, holding him, on the talcumy earth.
So this is it, I thought. This is my father’s death. I did not know how to help, what to do; where to bury him. I stroked his wispy hair, which had once been thick and prosperous enough to base a marriage on.
I opened my mouth to speak, and realized I had nothing to tell him. All I could think of were the deathbed clichés, which any stranger might have offered. Still, I offered them. The alternative was to let him die in silence.
“It’s all right,” I said. “Everything’s all right.”
He could not speak. His face was darkened and enlarged by the effort of his breathing.
I said, “Don’t worry about Mom or me. We’ll be fine. Everything’s all right, really. Everything’s fine.”
I couldn’t tell if he heard me. He seemed to have gone so far inside himself, to have withdrawn from his own brain and focused his very being on the insufficient action of his lungs. I kept stroking his head and shoulders. I kept telling him everything would be all right.
And, after a while, he recovered. The air started catching in his lungs again and his face, minute by minute, lost its wild, strangled quality. We sat together in the dirt while his lungs, worn thin as cheesecloth, somehow managed once again to negotiate the passage of oxygen.
Finally he was able to say, “Guess I overextended. I got a little carried away there.”
“You’d better stay here,” I said. “I’ll go get help.”
He shook his head. “I’ll be all right,” he said. “We just have to walk back very slowly. Okay?”
“Sure. Of course. Dad, I’m sorry.”
“What for?”
I helped him to his feet and we began the long walk home. It would take us over an hour to cover a distance we’d managed in twenty minutes on the way out. Stars fell overhead.
When I was fifteen, my father and I drove to Chicago together on a shopping trip and got caught in a storm on our way back. Rain fell in sheets; the sky deepened to the opaque green-gray that breeds tornadoes. It got so bad we pulled off at a rest area overlooking a muddy lake backed by the vast green of a barley field. Rain hammered on the roof and hood of our car. We sat in silence, occasionally clearing our throats, until a flick of lightning turned the lake’s surface a brief livid yellow. Then we both started to laugh. The lightning might have been the punch line of a long, complicated joke. When we were through laughing we talked about my future, about the possibility of getting a new dog, and about our ten favorite movies. After the storm passed we drove home with the radio playing and the windows open. Later we would learn that a tornado had in fact touched down in the vicinity and had flattened a water tower and an Amish cemetery not